Authors: Jim Newton
But the holes in the umbrella began to work mischief on the metaphor itself. Members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Dulles—as well as a number of academics and intellectuals—worried that the threat of retaliation might not be taken seriously in small conflicts: Would the United States really extend its nuclear protection to remote outposts of marginal strategic significance, or would it cede those areas to Communist provocation? In Europe, the question was posed differently but with similar ramifications. In Bonn, London, and Paris, leaders wondered whether the United States was prepared to risk its own cities to save its allies. That seemed doubtful. Many began to argue for a more flexible American strategy, specifically the development of tactical nuclear weapons and strategies that could be used in “limited” wars.
At first tentatively and then with intensifying grit, Eisenhower disagreed. In early 1956, he tangled with Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at an extraordinary session of the NSC, one that a preeminent scholar in the field of nuclear deterrence has described as “perhaps the richest NSC meeting on nuclear strategy during the entire Eisenhower era.” The meeting began with a briefing on the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, concluding that day in Moscow. While Khrushchev was denouncing Stalin, the council turned to the question of how and when nuclear weapons were to be used. The linchpin of the conversation was a line that governed the authority to launch nuclear weapons: “Nuclear weapons will be used in general war and in military operations short of general war as authorized by the President.” Radford proposed to amend that sentence to read: “Nuclear weapons will be used in general war and will be used in military operations short of general war when the effectiveness of the operations of the U.S. forces employed will be enhanced thereby. For such operations, the decision as to specific uses will be made by the President.”
Radford’s language preserved Eisenhower’s ultimate authority but envisioned nuclear weapons being used to enhance a military position, a markedly lower threshold than “massive retaliation.” Radford argued for that because nuclear weapons were increasingly integrated into American military operations: “Inability to use these weapons would greatly reduce both our defensive and offensive capabilities.”
But Eisenhower had by now come to believe that nuclear weapons were different. While he had once encouraged commanders and the public to consider them merely one more weapon in a vast array of armaments, he now believed that was an error. Using nuclear weapons to resolve regional conflicts would carry obvious political ramifications. Allies would recoil at a nuclear blast to protect an insignificant asset; such an attack would invite the world’s opprobrium. World opinion might be wrong, he conceded, but the United States could not afford to act militarily “without regard for the political repercussions of such a course of action.” Imagine, he continued, if field commanders had access to nuclear weapons and permission to use them to defend themselves. A military commander whose “radar informs him that a flock of enemy bombers is on the point of attacking him” would face the ultimate decision: die or launch. “What does the field commander do in such a contingency?” Ike asked. “Does he not use every weapon at hand to defend himself and his forces?” He defends his troops, of course. But if, in doing so, he obliterated thousands or even millions of civilians, what price would America pay?
To Eisenhower, the paradox of nuclear weapons was this: as the Cold War’s two principal warriors developed the capacity to destroy each other and the rest of the world along with them, the viability of limited nuclear conflict receded, replaced by a universal threat to all. As Eisenhower put it: “We must now plan to fight peripheral wars on the same basis as we would fight a general war.” We must, he was saying, be prepared to destroy civilization every time local conflicts were repelled by nuclear weapons, whatever their size.
What of wars short of direct confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union? What of future Koreas? “What would we do if the Vietminh undertook to attack South Vietnam?” John Foster Dulles asked. “Would we proceed to drop atomic bombs on Peking?” Maybe not, Ike replied, but the United States would bomb any base in China used to support the attack. That might fall short of an attack on China’s capital, but the casualties would be astonishing, and the world reaction extremely volatile. A regional conflict would thus immediately constitute a general war.
Eisenhower’s misgivings were evident, but once he had made his point, he did not press to make it official policy at that time. The views of Dulles and the Joint Chiefs remained codified in America’s official national security policy, which still left Eisenhower with ultimate authority over nuclear weapons, even if it did officially countenance their use in limited conflicts. Still, Eisenhower’s growing conviction was that flexible response—using nuclear weapons to defend American military interests in remote parts of the world—was a dangerous fallacy. As that seed of doubt took root, he devoted his energies to pursuing peace and imagined the consequences of failure.
When the NSC again took up the question of the nation’s basic security in 1957, Eisenhower was prepared to argue his case more forcefully. And by 1958, he had completed his evolution regarding his most basic assumptions about the use of nuclear weapons. The crucial conversation in his conversion occurred on May 27, 1957. This time, Eisenhower employed language that would assist commanders in distinguishing between local wars and general conflict—the former calling for restraint and cautious use of force, the latter demanding the deployment of the nuclear arsenal in all its terrible might. To that end, Eisenhower argued for a national security policy that specifically recognized the dangers and imperatives that applied to local wars, those that involved U.S. interests but only small numbers of American troops. Although the resulting document left open the possibility of using nuclear weapons in such conflicts, it emphasized that in the use of force on remote battlefields, it would “be applied in a manner and on a scale best calculated to avoid hostilities from broadening into general war.” Restraint, not escalation, was to be pursued. Moreover, the use of nuclear weapons—a power still reserved exclusively to the president—would be appropriate to achieve not simply “military objectives,” as defense leaders sought, but only “national objectives.” Dulles left the meeting early that day to keep an appointment with the chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer. Once he was gone, the revised document, with Eisenhower’s language intact, was approved.
Ike’s victory over his own subordinates was significant, but within weeks Bobby Cutler raised objections. It would be, Cutler argued, “extremely unwise to put all the eggs in the big weapon, unlimited force power basket.” To do so would be to lock the United States into a rigid and illogical defense posture, preventing commanders from meeting a local flare-up with limited nuclear power rather than risking everything. Cutler emphasized: “We want to be able to treat a hangnail without amputating the arm.” His arguments represented a powerful counterpoint to Ike’s and reflected the views of many within the NSC and the cabinet, not to mention the military establishment.
Advocates of flexible response were emboldened by one of the Cold War’s most influential studies. After the completion of the basic national security review in early 1957, Eisenhower convened a group of scientists and analysts to review American nuclear defenses. He asked H. Rowan Gaither Jr., a founder of the RAND Corporation and chairman of the Ford Foundation, to head the panel and asked it to examine America’s ability to withstand a nuclear attack. Once the committee was assembled, Gaither expanded its mandate to a more comprehensive study of nuclear weapons, their effectiveness and utility, and the relative strengths of the United States and the Soviet Union. Fatefully, Gaither brought on board Paul Nitze, a leading proponent of flexible response, the very notion that Ike was attempting to bury.
The report, formally titled
Deterrence & Survival in the Nuclear Age
but generally referred to as the Gaither Report, sketched a terrifying future. Written largely by Nitze, it argued that the Soviets were advancing quickly and on the verge of overtaking the United States’ nuclear arsenal, conceivably positioning themselves for global domination. “The evidence clearly indicates an increasing threat which may become critical in 1959 or early 1960,” the panel began. The conclusion was even more stark: “The next two years seem to us critical. If we fail to act at once, the risk, in our opinion, will be unacceptable.”
To avoid such a calamity, the committee proposed dramatic increases in defense spending—$4.8 billion to $11.9 billion a year for five years, with unstated increases after that—and a rapid expansion of the American missile force. The committee recommended increasing the size of the medium-range missile battery from 60 to 240 and the long-range missile supply from 80 to 600. The group recommended increases in the number of nuclear weapons based on submarines and the construction of a national system of fallout shelters, estimated to cost another $25 billion—this at a time when the entire American defense budget was approximately $38 billion. The shelter proposal was wrapped in a particularly bleak vision of a postwar America, its surviving citizens forced to live underground for an undetermined period, only to reemerge and “remake a way of life in our own country.” Finally, the Gaither Committee recommended what had by now become Eisenhower’s bête noire: development of a doctrine to guide “when and how nuclear weapons can contribute to limited operations.”
The Gaither Report was prepared through the summer and fall of 1957. Just before it was presented to the president, the Soviets triumphantly shot off
Sputnik
and sent America into spasms of self-doubt about its technical capacities and military strength. Members of the Gaither group consequently anticipated a receptive audience from Eisenhower when they presented him with their findings on November 4, three days before the report was given to the full NSC. They were disappointed.
Although Eisenhower received leaders of the committee politely, he rejected their most basic conclusions. American strategic forces were more powerful than the Gaither Committee believed, Ike said. Later intelligence was to prove him right and the committee wrong; Gaither’s group had underestimated U.S. strength and vastly overestimated Soviet nuclear armaments. Eisenhower also questioned the usefulness of a national network of shelters, an extravagantly expensive program to extend the life spans of those who would inhabit the rubble of American postwar society. The shelters were dogged by practical questions as well as financial ones: Did family shelters exist for purchase? How would air be supplied to them if power were disrupted? “It looked to the President as though a lot of questions would have to find an answer before the country was ready to commit itself to a major program,” Sherman Adams wrote. And as for preparing to fight limited nuclear wars, Ike emphasized, there was only one suitable use for the most powerful weapons at his disposal. “Maximum massive retaliation,” Eisenhower insisted, “remains the crux of our defense.”
Three days later, when the NSC received its briefing, Ike raised several sharper points. The shelter proposal, he suggested, would require such intensive government operation that it might force the government to take control of the economy. This was only a few years after the Republicans had championed the relaxation of government controls from the Truman era. “Was the Panel proposing to impose controls on the U.S. economy now?” Eisenhower asked. He recognized that
Sputnik
had scared the American people, but he refused to flinch. It was essential, he said, “that we neither become panicked nor allow ourselves to be complacent.” The session that day was cut short by scheduling demands, but as it closed, Ike wondered out loud how long this top secret material would remain so.
The Gaither panel was so dire in its warnings, so histrionic in its assessment of danger, that even Dulles refused to accept its findings. He conferred privately with Eisenhower and conceded that such expenditures could probably not be justified in light of the remote danger that preoccupied the committee: the all-out surprise attack on the American homeland by a Soviet enemy willing to court its own destruction. In the event of such a war, Eisenhower reflected later that week, both nations “would be smashed so that they could not recover for a long time,” leaving “another power, probably Germany [to] emerge as the greatest in the world.”
Having failed to persuade the president to adopt the recommendations of the Gaither Report, a member of the group—almost certainly Nitze—elected to pursue those objectives by leaking the document to the press. Within weeks, the
Washington Post
featured a story summarizing the report, as well as Eisenhower’s brusque dismissal. Democrats seized on the imbroglio as evidence of dangerous complacency on the part of the Republican administration. They lampooned Ike as a loafer, spending his time on the links while scheming Soviets stole American secrets and surpassed American strength. That image, of a country-club Eisenhower ignoring the nation’s growing vulnerability, would dominate the administration’s final months, as politically damaging as it was patently false.
By 1958, Ike had faced down his top advisers again and again. Though it would have pleased his advisers and placated political critics, Eisenhower would never yield to the demand that he prepare American forces to fight small nuclear wars. Instead, he insisted that the only way to preserve the peace was to make obliteration the alternative. His generals vehemently disagreed. “I’m the only Army general to have disassociated myself from Army thinking,” Ike observed to a group of advisers in 1959. “I have been called a traitor for this more than once.”
Through one uprising after another, Eisenhower stood fast on the most essential aspect of his national security policy—not through inaction but by stern resolve and forceful argument. From 1958 on, it was all or nothing, deterrence or death. As Eisenhower remarked to the NSC in 1959, American policy boiled down to this: if the Russians start a war, “we will finish it.” That, the NSC minutes recorded, “was all the policy the President said he had.” A major war between the Soviet Union and the United States would devastate them both. But the threat of it might just keep them both alive. It was a terrible gamble, but Ike was a terrific poker player.